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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

New York State Responded to Cyber Attack on Government Servers Weeks Before Coronavirus Pandemic Hit

Monday, April 20, 2020

Categories: ASCF News Emerging Threats Cyber Security

Comments: 0

Just before New York became the center of the coronavirus pandemic, state officials were grappling with a massive cyber attack targeting state agency information systems that took almost a month to fully address.

The Albany Times Union reported that the January attack, believed to have originated from hackers outside the U.S., disabled access to databases regularly used by New York state police, the state environmental department and the civil service department.

The incident was previously unreported and did not reveal the personal information of residents or state employees, according to state officials. Hackers were also not able to steal or expose information from the databases, said Rich Azzopardi, a senior adviser to Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

“With the review complete, there is no evidence that personal data of any New York resident, employee, or any other individuals were compromised or have been taken from our network,” Azzopardi said. “In the meantime, ITS (Office of Information Technology Services) has taken actions to further harden our network and protect the integrity of our system.”

Officials believe that the New York attack was part of a massive worldwide hacking campaign on Citrix NetScalers, which are used to “facilitate communications between computer users,” according to the Times Union. On Jan. 28, technicians found that seven of the devices were hacked at the state’s main server farm in Albany.

Citrix announced in mid-December that it had found a potential security flaw with its system, making 80,000 companies vulnerable to attack. Patches were sent out to fix the issue, but it appears that state officials did not make the change in time to prevent the installation of malware that blocked access to the databases.

CrowdStrike was hired to conduct a three-week forensic investigation on more than 40 computer servers, the Times Union reported. The attack has not interfered with the pandemic response efforts coordinated by the state government, but the state is footing the bill for CrowdStrik’s endpoint monitoring system that tracks potential suspicious activity on networks.

As Azzopardi told the newspaper: “It’s the cost of doing business these days.”

Photo and link: https://securitytoday.com/articles/2020/04/20/new-york-state-responded-to-cyber-attack-on-government-servers.aspx?admgarea=ht.businesscontinuity

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